August 7, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Wake up! Take your head out of Uranus and smell the coffee—the cosmic sh*t is about to hit the fan.

Since August 7th, Uranus—the rebel planet—has been dragging its heels and lagging behind our own comparatively well-behaved world.

Yet, despite our perfectly placed planet, many of us terrans seem to be forever in a hurry to get to where we are going.

Once more around the sun, and step on it! I have a busy life to lead!

We have not quite figured out just yet that “busy” is a socially engineered disease. We will, in time.

The reality is, things just can’t happen any quicker—or slower for that matter—than they actually do. It’s called divine timing.

As we ride on the back of the cosmic elephant, it matters not one jot how hard we kick our impatient heels at its pan-galactic shoulders or pull fearfully on its existential ears, it will continue to stride purposefully on at its own indomitable pace. We are not in control.

The truth is, when Uranus goes retrograde it really isn’t slowing down at all or or going backward, it’s all just an optical illusion.

Imagine you’re sitting on a stationary train in a station, then the train on the next platform starts to move, and you get that strange feeling like your own train is sliding backwards! But of course it isn’t. That’s right, your train has just gone retrograde! But of course it hasn’t.

Uranus—which the ancient Greeks called Ouranos, god of the sky—is the seventh planet from the sun, and Earth is the third. So as we earthlings whizz busily around the solar system, literally on the inside track, Uranus has to take the long way around, (the orbital route so to speak) travelling once around the sun every 84 years. So when we pass one another on the celestial highway our relative speeds makes Uranus appear as if it’s slowing down or even going backward, just like that train in the station.

But rest assured, the laws of physics have not been broken.

Uranus is undoubtedly on the right track and diligently observing the universal speed limit—186,000 miles per second according to Albert Einstein, and I guess he would know.

That means you and me and everyone else on this gorgeous god-sized blue marble are also undoubtedly on the right track and observing the same universal speed limit. There’s something quite reassuring about that.

So why be in such a hurry to get to where we’re going? No matter what, we will all arrive at our destination. Why get frustrated at a retrograde Uranus that seems to have slowed our journey down. After all, it really hasn’t. As far as the cosmic elephant is concerned, we are travelling at exactly the speed we are supposed to travel and going exactly where we are meant to go, so please stop kicking its astronomical arse and pulling on its eternal ears.

Now, equipped with this precious knowledge, we can all relax, put our collective feet up, and enjoy the scenery as Uranus passes the tropospheric train window in all its naked glory, and marvel at its ring system and numerous moons.

But don’t get too comfortable. Uranus, like all gas giants, has super strong winds that can turn the tempestuous tides of fate and fortune.

Despite our strong urges to be rebellious and autonomous—in keeping with the rebel planet—it’s useful to remember that there’s no one quite so lost and lonely as a rebel without a cause. And it’s perhaps more useful to realise that autonomy is a state that exists only in the context of interdependence.

So we must each tack and jibe carefully on the sea of love and lost labours, and avoid capsizing our wind-blown relationships, both personal and professional.

With Uranus in retrograde Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will feel like the vying governors of your disparate emotions that seem to come out of the blue—but the reality is they usually do, whether your head is in Uranus or not.

The key, as always, is awareness.

Give yourself time to watch your feelings rise and then subside, like passing wind.

If we endeavour to be honest about the cause of our emotions, then we can be honest and better manage the effect of our emotions, on ourselves and on others.

At this time, just like the other six months of the year when Uranus is out of sight and out of mind, also be aware of the urge to be confrontational. However this is not necessarily a bad thing. We may want or need not only to be contrary, but also to confront the things we fear, the things which make us feel vulnerable or insecure, especially our own BS.

When Uranus is retrograde it is all too easy to project onto others and unconsciously dump our crap on their doorstep.

When a retrograde Uranus is seemingly slowing down our progress and revealing our frustrations, it is a good time to remember that nothing is guaranteed. Despite being told over and over by guru-lite mystics that we are each masters of our own universe and co-creators of its reality, there is a humbling truth to acknowledge.

The power we are tirelessly told is ours to relentlessly seek and claim, and do with what we will, is not really ours at all. It is borrowed and must be given back, continually and ultimately.

Think of it this way, on the cosmic ocean of consciousness (the sea of love if you will), we are each a wave of love, and the power we feel surging through us does not really belong to us, it belongs to the cosmic ocean of consciousness.

That power is expressed through us, not by us, in our every thought, word and deed. That power ebbs and flows, rises and falls, not at our behest, but rather at the impartial, impersonal, and unconditional free will of the ocean itself. That’s right, free will is not yours or mine, it belongs to the impersonal and unconditional divine. Let go.

Humbling isn’t it? But after all isn’t that the spiritual path, humility? A message so easily forgotten in this New Age when so many spiritual pushers and punters alike succumb to the easy-sell seduction and cheap high of personal power and its gateway drug, empowerment.

Self-help book psycho-babble has now normalised spiritual greed.

Not so long ago, the quiet but enlightened message was surrender and liberation, now supplanted by a brash New Age message telling us all to step into our power. It’s nothing more than a corrupted copy of the age-old religious blueprint. Retrograde indeed.

Following that blueprint, the ego becomes as big as Uranus, and the universe becomes little more than our spiritual shopping mall, as we imagine—with a greedy sense of first-world privilege and entitlement—that we are manifesting our every desire.

When the pursuit of power becomes normalised in spirituality, it is all too easy to be trippin’ over ourselves in the pursuit of more and more.

Instead, we could be letting go of the self and trusting the ocean of consciousness—the sea of love—to carry us, support us, and drive us through this bizarre and beautiful life. Surrender.

That is not to suggest we succumb to complacency or forgo our responsibility of action, but rather in understanding the origin of our actions we act, in every sense, as conscious and passionate vessels and guardians of love.

Karma means action. To recognise all action is expressed through the human heart and mind rather than by the human heart and mind reconciles all karma to its source, continually and ultimately. Liberation.

Then there is no journey to oneness, to grace, to love…to union. Our birthright is oneness, our state is grace, our journey and our destination is love. We are—each one of us—in perpetual union, waves of consciousness on an ocean of love.

This stuff that is the cause of all existence is called love simply because it allows all things to be. All things. Not just the cosmically cuddly and cute things, but also the dangerous, ugly, and cruel things.

This can be a difficult reality for the inherently tribal human psyche to accept.

A psyche that desperately desires a partisan universe instead of an impartial one, a biased divinity instead of an objective one, a cosmic order that plays favourites instead of a messy perfection that creates and destroys indiscriminately.

Our only job as human beings is to convert that raw and unconditional love into refined kind conditional love, much like the only job of each leaf on a tree is to convert raw sunlight into food.

Human beings love because, and it is the because which makes our love conditional—the food of love you could say, like billions of leaves on the tree of life.

Conversely, the universe loves regardless, and it is because it has no regard for who or what is loved that makes its love unconditional.

This fundamental misunderstanding of unconditional love has been the seed of every religious and spiritual superstition ever devised by humanity.

The unsophisticated, yet insidious premise of superstition is simply this: if we invest in rituals and rites, prescribed by an ever growing gaggle of wannabe gurus and goddesses, then the universe will discard its primary principle of impartial, objective, and unconditional love and instead regard me and my tribe among its favourites.

It is a primitive premise, founded in fear, and negligent of a broader benevolent understanding.

It’s just like Stevie Wonder once sang,

“When you believe in things that you don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way!”

Apparently, even a blind man can see that no matter how we might try to organise the stars the universe cannot be coerced, persuaded, or bribed.

We are all loved, without prejudice or preference, by the unconditional divine.

Bearing that in mind, now is the perfect time to take our heads out of Ouranus and let go of our bullsh*t and our baggage.

What to do when our Relationships get Tough.